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Feminist scholars to Obama: End prosecution of Palestinian survivor of sexual torture

Rasmea Odeh (left) and attorney Jim Fennerty with supporters outside the US federal courthouse in Detroit on 13 November 2013.

Ali Abunimah

Between 1969-1979, Rasmea Odeh served ten years in an Israeli prison. Her sentence was based on a confession she made in the midst of 45 days of sexual and physical torture while in detention. Following her release, she was exiled from her Palestinian homeland and eventually immigrated to the United States from Jordan in 1994 as a legal resident where she tried to put her memories of torture behind her. She later became a naturalized citizen.

In the US, Rasmea settled in Chicago where she became the associate director of the Arab American Action Network, a social service and community organization. There, she established the Arab Women’s Committee, a grassroots collective that promotes leadership among Arab immigrant women, challenges systems of oppression that impact Arab women’s lives and secures a positive and safe political, economic, social, and cultural environment for Arab women and their communities. In 2013, the Chicago Cultural Alliance granted Rasmea its Outstanding Community Leader Award in recognition of her devotion of “over forty years of her life to the empowerment of Arab women.”

Now, Rasmea is being persecuted again for not giving account of her time in jail after her torture 45 years ago on her naturalization application in 2004.

On 22 October 2013, the US Department of Justice arrested Rasmea Odeh at her home in the Chicago Suburbs. The Department of Justice alleges that Odeh failed to disclose on her naturalization application that she had served time in Israeli jail – even though her sentence was based on a confession she made in the midst of weeks of torture. Rasmea faces up to ten years in US prison, fines up to $250,000 and potential deportation and de-naturalization.

They are also connected to a long history of federal authorities using fear and repression to silence Palestinian-American activists and intimidate immigrant women from participating in social justice movements.

Rasmea Odeh has suffered enough already. When the Israeli military arrested her, they also arrested her family members shortly after her arrest and destroyed her family’s home. Odeh’s 1969 conviction in Israel was determined by a court system that systematically abuses Palestinians’ due process rights, has a record of torture and sexual abuse of Palestinian women, men, and children, and convicts Palestinians at a rate of 99.74 percent.

As feminist scholars, we call on the Department of Justice to drop the charges against Rasmea Odeh. We extend our deepest support to Rasmea in the face of injustice. We recognize her as a leader in the international struggle to empower women and end violence against women. We recognize the pain and suffering she endured in Israeli prisons and we honor her for testifying before a United Nations Committee in Geneva as a survivor of sexual torture.

We honor her decades of feminist activism on behalf of Arab and Muslim immigrant women living in poverty in Chicago. Rasmea built the Arab Women’s Committee and its base of nearly six hundred Arab immigrant women from scratch when she went door to door as a recent immigrant herself and made phone calls to households with Arabic names from the white pages.

She developed an infrastructure for disenfranchised Arab immigrant and refugee women to obtain social services and support and she established English as a second language courses through which immigrant women perform plays, write their immigration stories and form deep friendships, sisterhood, and solidarity.

Because of Rasmea’s work, immigrant and refugee women who came to the US from countries facing war and political crises – like Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, Syria, and beyond – now have a place to seek support, gain empowerment and community and call their home.

Rasmea’s story encompasses some of the most urgent feminist struggles of our times – violence against women and the use of sexual violence as a tool of colonization and war; the impact of racism and anti-immigrant policies upon women; the criminalization of women of color; and the use of intimidation to thwart feminist activism.

Rasmea’s trial is set to begin 4 November 2014, in Detroit, Michigan.

We call upon all feminist movements to stand with gender justice and centralize Rasmea Odeh’s struggle within all of our movements.

We call upon President Obama and the United States Department of Justice to drop the charges against Rasmea Odeh.

Sarah Abboud, Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania

Stéphanie Latte Abdallah, Researcher, CNRS (IFPO)

Diya Abdo, Associate Professor, Guilford College

Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, Associate Professor, San Francisco State University

Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor, Columbia University

Fida J. Adely, Associate Professor, Georgetown University

Jocelyn Ajami

Nadje Al-Ali, Professor, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)

Dina Al-Kassim, Associate Professor, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

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Comments

It's obvious that this is an Israeli symphathiser's type of charge and no real analysis of facts has been evaluated !
America is now in the hands of extreemests and Israeli sponsored APAIC supporters, so no responsible government action can be expected or garnered without a political revolution to remove nearly all of the current political establishment both Republican and Democrat from office!
perhaps Elizabeth Warren or Chris Hedges or Jill Stine or Ralph Nader presidency could change this. However my bet is that any of these that succeeded to the presidency would be quickly murdered by a right wing freek just like The two Kennedy brothers and Martin L. King.
To support your agenda we need to have a change in courts to the top. A change in every level of government electing people like those mentioned above. Otherwise it's hopeless!

My feelings are the same and I am American. I loathe the bought and sold leaders who lie for their AIPAC/Israeli extortionists. There is no more shame in them. My only solace is to not recognize the illegitimate zionist occupation of Palestine and to boycott them. If only all decent Americans would STOP paying taxes and boycott DC...there's certainly not enough jails for all of us...and at least those taxes wouldn't be going to the occupation to murder Palestinians. This is ungodly hell.

The Palestinian people are being dispossessed of their land and their lives by a racist, colonial ideology that is not the ideology of all Jews.

It took a great deal of courage for Rasmea to fight her way back to a semblance of normalcy; for the US to threaten her with deportation and prison again is obscene. The law without mercy leaves us with shattered lives, bodies and minds.

It is time to cease this woman's persecution, and I urge you to do so.

I'm not a professor. But I've done legal work for women fighting the abuses of the family court system and have published books and articles on victims of abuse, and I endorse the letter in support of Rasmea Odeh.

Much outrage has recently (and rightly) been showered upon the government of Iran for executing a woman who alleged that the man she stabbed had sexually assaulted her. Where is the parallel outrage at the U.S. government for its treatment of Rasmea Odeh, which implicitly countenances Israeli's systematic use of torture -- including sexual abuse -- while heaping additional punishment on one of its victims?

Whether or not this lady confessed under torture is not the issue, the issue is that she lied under OATH, and based on that lie, she was subsequently granted citizenship. It clearly states on the forms that any lie once discovered would lead to prosecution imprisonment loss of citizenship and deportation. If such a precedent is established, then it opens the gate for any one to lie on sworn applications for citizenship, then claim their previous convictions were as a result of torture if ever found out. She has already impacted the lives of so many Arab women for good, why not accept that this is the will of God, for her to continue to carry out her god work in another part of the world. Certainly women in the Arab world would benefit from such experience and leadership qualities

Assuming the existence of a deliberately false statement, are all such statements really grounds for automatic deportation, as you suggest?

Had she stated that her eyes were blue when in fact they're brown, would she be properly prosecuted and deported, ten years later, for that false claim? For that matter, had she been a Chinese human rights activist who failed to report having been prosecuted before a kangaroo court in Beijing (during which proceeding she was also tortured), would you demand her deportation to China for the lapse? And would you sneer that it was "the will of God" that she should continue her activism among the Chinese now that she was "found out"?

It is possible, of course, to answer "yes" to all of these questions. But I wonder how many people are really prepared to take that position -- except where a Palestinian activist is the one under threat. Which brings us back to Rasmea Odeh and the reasons for the protest against her prosecution, all of which your comment evades.

These 2 situations are completely different,, there is no way she had a lapse in memory when failing to report her imprisonment, and her deliberate action can be understood from the point of view of the allegations of torture and sexual abuse against the officials of the Israeli state. Even I am not sure of the colour of my eyes, so any judge would find that such a matter was trivial, even if deporting an activist to China may not be desirable. The point I am trying to make is that, one should not be blind to fate and its leading or direction, it is possible she has a great work to carry out, and fighting such a case may shackle her and not allow her to fulfil God's purpose for her life. America is not heaven, and even if she is deported to the West bank, or any Arab country is that a death sentence? There are others carrying out the struggle there, why can't she contribute there? You and I do not know what her purpose is for the rest of her life, she should hold her head high, and follow her destiny with pride, having achieved so much despite the adversity she has had to come through

Hi, I'm kind of wondering when Americans are going to DO anything. Seems like people have kind of woken up, but actually addressing the power imbalance between the state and the people is another thing. Seems people are too afraid to risk. See a lot of complaints and verbal outrage. But.... just kind of wondering what it will actually take for people to fight for the change so many of us want. Not petition, not march (in circles), etc etc. The powerful grip power in their hands. So when will the people take the risks to fight for their dreams?

I am from Australia and I heard about Ms Odeh's situation and I am outraged. And yet it doesn't escape my awareness that I too come from a racist country with pro-Zionist, anti refugee, racist, fascist, sexist policies.
As a Jew, I apologise to Ms Odeh, for although the evils of Zionism are not in my name, they continue while Jewish people who should know what it is to be violently persecuted, sit back and do nothing.
Ms Odeh is being criminalised twice for crimes which are not her own. I support this petition and call shame on America. Our big daddy is showing us again how to be the murderous, violent bully of the world. Shame.